She had sworn she would never do it. When she was pregnant with Simone she had lain awake at night swearing it.
And then Simone had been born, and Simone had been hard. Colicky, sleepless, furious, a baby who screamed for four hours every evening for four months and stared at her mother in between like she was keeping score. Lorraine had been twenty-nine and alone most nights because Calvin was working doubles, and she had walked the floors of their old apartment with that red-faced infant on her shoulder, and somewhere in those months something in her had closed a little. She hadn't meant it to. She hadn't noticed it happen.
Then there had been the two losses. The one at eleven weeks and the one at nineteen. The second one had a name that only Lorraine and Calvin knew and never said. Lorraine had spent most of a year after that so far down inside herself that she could not remember, later, what Simone had looked like at five, or whether she had gone to Simone's kindergarten concert, or who had braided Simone's hair.
And then there was Micah. Micah, who arrived three weeks early and slept through the night at six weeks and smiled at everyone, at the mailman, at the ceiling fan, at her. Micah who wanted to be held, who said *Mommy* like it was the best word he knew, who crawled into her lap on bad days and put his small hot hands on her face. Micah was easy. Micah was the first easy thing that had happened to Lorraine in years, and she had held on to him the way you hold on to the side of a boat.
She knew. Somewhere in her she had always known. You did not get to be the oldest daughter of Hattie Mae Coleman without learning what it looked like, and she had seen it in her own house, in herself, and every time she had turned away from it, because the alternative was admitting that Micah was not perfect, and if Micah was not perfect then nothing was easy anymore, and she did not think she could live in a house where nothing was easy.
And then her mother died. And her mother had left her the vase, which was the one thing in Hattie's house that Lorraine had loved without complication, and every day for fourteen months she had walked past it on the shelf and thought: *I never got to fix it with her. I never got to say it. This is what I have.*
And today she had come down the stairs and seen it on the floor, and seen Simone standing over it—Simone with Hattie's eyes, Hattie's tilted head—and it had felt, for one blinding second, as if her mother had broken it herself. As if Hattie had reached across fourteen months and one more time, one last time, taken something from her.
None of that was Simone's fault. Lorraine knew that standing in the kitchen with her hands flat on the counter. She had known it, probably, on the stairs.
It did not make what she had done any smaller. That was the worst part. Understanding it didn't shrink it at all.
***
"I took her money," Lorraine said. "I went in her bag in front of him and took her money."
"I know."
"She keeps it in her bag because of him. Did you know that? The seven dollars. She told me in June that he got in her closet and I told her she should be more careful where she leaves things." Lorraine laughed, a short awful sound. "So she started carrying it. Every day. She's been carrying every dollar she has to school and back since June because she can't leave it in her own room in her own house, and I went in there and took it."
Calvin didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.
"And he just sat there," Lorraine said. Her voice broke for the first time. "He sat at that table with his crackers and watched me do it. My baby. He watched me do it and he didn't say a word."